Deal or no deal?

Great conversation going on on CNN right now. Finally, finally, on the eve of a potential debt-ceiling deal passing through Congress, CNN's Ali Velshi is saying what has needed to be said throughout this process, and he's stridently challenging CNN's token Republican correspondent Alex Castellanos while he's at it. Maybe he (or others) have been saying this before and I haven't been picking up on it since I don't watch TV. What's he saying?

• It's the unemployment, stupid. As long as unemployment remains at 9.2%, all else is basically a moot point in the economic conversation. People who don't have jobs don't have money and don't spend the money they don't have on stuff they don't need, which is what we call "growth." (That's my dig on modern capitalism, not Velshi's, but it needs to be part of the conversation.) High unemployment = sucky economy = self-reinforcing economic death spiral. Simple as that. As long as unemployment remains mysteriously absent from the political debate, we're inherently talking band-aids at best, not real fixes.
• The debt-ceiling crisis is entirely self-imposed (by Republicans -- and we can't say that enough). Castellanos made a U.S.-Greece comparison, saying that we're spending ourselves into oblivion like Greece, and Velshi jumped in to say that's not it at all: Greece can't issue bonds; we have (deservedly or not) a AAA credit rating and can issue all the bonds we want. Apples and oranges. The Greeks spent themselves into oblivion, we put the gun to our own heads.
• The multiplier of government spending, and the un-economics of the cuts-only proposed deal: ostensibly, cuts and tax hikes have equal effects on the economy (they both take money out of citizens' hands and arguably reduce confidence/investment). As Velshi points out, though, government spending disproportionately affects the least-well-off citizens, who put most or all of the money they receive right back into the economy to purchase essentials. (I'd note that the implication is that essentials might be foregone if the government doesn't aid these people, but since they neither matter nor make themselves heard, I'd probably just be howling at the moon.) Anyway, tax cuts benefit the more-well-off, who don't spend every dollar they have (witness the record corporate cash holdings and CEO pay packages co-existing with the historically shitty economy). Bottom line: we'll see nearly 100% of money given to the neediest re-invested in the economy almost immediately, while money retained by the wealthiest will trickle into their trust funds and not "down" throughout the economy.
• Velshi's greatest hits: "I [speaking as the Republicans] just saved a life because I didn't kill somebody tonight." "We have now plugged the hole that we [Republicans]...shot into the bottom of the boat." "I don't understand how this [cuts-only deal] will create a single job."
  

These are all excellent, well-made points that are absolutely critical for the country to hear and understand. I might be a C+ student in economics, but since the Tea Party have clearly never taken economics, I'll take the liberty of running through a quick econ lesson here:

GDP = C + I + G + X, where GDP is the Gross Domestic Product (the most-used indicator of economic performance, the total value of all goods and services produced within a country in a given time), C is consumption (people and businesses buying stuff), I is investment, G is government spending and X is the export balance (value of exports minus value of imports). Pretty much since the Industrial Revolution, we've experienced the (completely unnatural) miracle of unceasing economic growth. That is, GDP has been steadily rising throughout the world (especially in the global North and West). Even with notable hiccups like the Great Depression, we're so conditioned to the false norm of perpetual growth after centuries of it that the economy is completely unprepared to confront the end of the party. Now, the music hasn't stopped, but C, I and X have taken huge downturns in the recession. That's pretty much what defines recessions: individual and corporate consumers lose confidence and/or disposable income, so they decrease spending, investment and export. To keep growth steady or increasing, the only option left is G: government spending. This is basic Keynesian economics, borne out by the Great Depression, New Deal and WWII: economy (C + I + X, GDP) crashed, FDR borrowed to increase G through the New Deal, then G finally went into overdrive to fight WWII. War and Depression over, C + I + X went way up as we all know. So did G, but the post-War "American Century" was fueled by private spending. Long story short: government spending is critical to picking up the slack in C + I + X during recessions (that's a lot of slack), and the only way to do so is to borrow. If the current stimulus has failed, it has thus failed through smallness, not over-largeness.

Secondly, unemployment is a "lagging indicator:" it stays low as recessions develop (it still takes time to lay people off), but stays high even after recoveries (it takes a while for businesses to decide to hire and then do so). Thus, to claim that our despicably high unemployment rate is a direct failure of the Obama administration is wishful thinking at best: remember, the recession started under the Bush administration, and unemployment picked up under the Obama administration mostly because it took until after "01/20/09" for the "lag" to end. That unemployment hasn't been a higher (i.e. all-consuming) priority of the Obama administration is inexplicably crazy to me, but to simply assert -- as most Republicans do -- that it is somehow purely the fault of Obama and his agenda is fallacious and/or outright untrue.

And some points of my own:

• Let's unpack the oft-cited "family finances" argument trotted out by the Tea Party. They claim that the government needs to live within its means like families. First of all, plenty of families don't do that: they have credit cards, they have mortgages, they have home-equity credit, whatever. Second of all, it is definitely not how the government operates, nor how it's meant to. We actually started building our AAA credit by taking on more debt, not balancing the budget: Alexander Hamilton (one of those Founding Father types the Tea Party are so eager to talk about) consolidated all post-Revolutionary state debts into Federal debt as a way of enticing the states to hang together politically and support the Federal government. That it worked isn't justification for indiscriminately taking on debt, but it's worth noting. Next, it's vital to keep in mind that the money the administration is requesting now is needed simply to pay off our old obligations: in family terms, the mortgage, not the fancy vacation. Families in dire straights should think twice about going deep into debt to buy expensive trinkets in future, but ceasing payments on the mortgage just because they suddenly realized there was a money crunch is neither logical nor possible. Where were today's debt hawks when we were tax cutting and double-war-fighting our way from a budget surplus to the current deficit?
• What's really in the new "deal?" I haven't had a chance to fully read through it yet, but this is important stuff. In addition to putting the government on a certain path for the foreseeable future, it will also tell us what each party's agenda, non-negotiable and compromised points are. That said, consider the cuts in context: is cutting defense spending a good idea in the abstract? Yes. But in the middle of two still-unfunded wars? Probably not. Remember the "Pottery Barn rule?" ("You break it, you buy it.") Well, we invaded two countries and we now have a moral responsibility for the end game in each of them, as well as the continued material and financial support of the (precious few) men and women actually doing our fighting for us. If we suddenly decide to save money on armor and bullets in an IED- and enemy-rich environment, the country will have failed its troops. The NYT ran a poignant story the other day about soldiers and Marines asking Chairman Mullen about what would happen to their paychecks if the government defaults when the Chairman visited Afghanistan. How dare the Republicans, Tea Partiers and anyone else who wants to mess around with default keep wearing those obnoxious little flag pins and spouting "support the troops" and "God bless America?" You go drive the IED-infested roads in a thin-skinned Humvee with nothing but your lapel pin for body armor and no paychecks coming in.
• Even if we get an 11th-hour deal, it won't be good enough, no matter what's in it. Re-imagining the U.S. and global economies is far too big and important a task to cobble together in the nick of time. Let's say this deal passes (it's probably better than even money). Any representative, senator or administration official who grand-stands, photo-ops, signs autographs, sings their own praises or otherwise takes any more credit or draws any more attention to themselves than to hang their head in shame and apologize to the American people for the lunacy of the crisis deserves public shaming and no chance at re-election. If the deal passes, we will have loaded the gun, put the barrel in our own mouth, fired and somehow dodged the bullet (this time). That should be cause for sober, somber reflection, not self-congratulation. By the same token, any media outlet that runs a couple of days of triumphal headlines and then moves on to the next celebrity melt-down or crisis du jour deserves equal blame. We've done tremendous damage to ourselves domestically and internationally (yes, Tea Party, there really are 193 other countries in the world -- and they're watching us, even if you're not watching them) in this manufactured crisis, and if we accept anything less than sincere apologies and honest work going forward from our government, we will only have allowed ourselves to have been duped again. If this doesn't convince us to demand better, we have the government we deserve.
• On changing the terms of the debate: the Times ran an article yesterday on freshman Tea Party representatives discovering "the power of saying no." (No wuckin' fay, right?) Multiple Tea Partiers said with straight, pained faces, how hard it was to look Boehner in the eye and tell him "No, sir" in response to his order that the freshmen "get [their] ass in line." Think about that: the freshmen are on such a debt-jihad bender that when Boehner's inner professional politician starts getting really worried about default and starts demanding compromise, they still refuse!! And the president and the papers still tell us both parties are equally at fault and aren't that far apart on a deal. That's laying on the BS thicker than the speaker lays on the fake tan. And, "In an e-mail to Republican House members, Mr. Boehner noted that 'discussions are underway on legislation that will cut government spending more than it increases the debt limit, and advance the cause of the balanced budget amendment, without job-killing tax hikes.' " My emphasis, but note what he's doing. This is basic Big Lie tactics, people: the more you link little (not-very) subliminal messages like this in people's minds, the more they start to drink the Kool-Aid. (Oh, and the balanced budget amendment is a crock of shit: see the point on family vs. government finances above.)
• And, once more with feeling, what the hell are you doing, Mr. President? Not only is he neither educating nor leading the Congress or the country, but he's prepared to sacrifice some of the most important Democratic priorities (little bitty programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare) to placate the Tea Party crazies. Not only is he way to the right of his base, he's to the right of even the majority of Republican voters! What gives? If he put Social Security on the table confident that Republicans would demand more anyway in order to show us how crazy they are, he needed to say something to that effect. That he didn't has me deeply worried that he's actually willing to horse-trade the Democrats' sacred cows (which happen to undergird the American social contract) so he can feel warm and fuzzy about making a compromise. Worse, we don't really have a say in this if he pulls it off. Thought One: what kind of raging Marxist Mau-Mau Muslim uber-socialist trades away Social Security and tax raises with hardly a whimper (i.e. when are the Republicans going to figure out they've actually got a fairly conservative President on their hands?)? Thought Two: what if (God forbid!) they do figure it out? How screwed are we going to be if and when the Tea Party realizes that, rather than a Mau Mau, they've finally got a Democrat in the White House who may very well give them what's left of the New Deal and the unions on a platter. Yes, entitlement programs need re-working, but run that through your mind...
• Finally, on the crime that is pledge-signing: when all but a handful (less than 10) congressional Republicans have signed anti-governing pledges, what are they doing in office (and why on Earth do we keep putting them there?)? Fifty years ago, the country worried that Jack Kennedy was going to be a tool of the Pope. Now, we actively encourage/demand that our elected representatives sign intransigence pledges saying, in essence, that they won't govern. People, what are we doing?! We should be more careful what we wish for, because we may get exactly that. And what do you know: farmers have come out against immigration reform, business and bank leaders have come out against the debt debacle, etc. Who's over-interpreting their mandate now?

Weekend Edition

Following up on the last post, weekend links

A couple of important posts from the professional opinion world:

• With "The Centrist Cop-Out," Paul Krugman has produced yet another simple, easy-to-digest case for what's really wrong with American politics today: we have met the enemy, and he is the GOP. In Krugman's words, "making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse." Couldn't have said it any better myself.
• Timothy Egan follows up with "A Madman and his Manifesto," detailing Rightist European and American responses to the Breivik attacks in Norway. If you listen to that lot, Breivik sold himself short: the world understood his actions in days, not decades. From this side of the Atlantic: "The bodies of those Norwegian children slaughtered by a terrorist had yet to be fully recovered, let alone buried, when Glenn Beck compared the victims to Nazis. The summer camp were the children of the Norwegian Labor Party went for soccer, swimming, political debates and lectures 'sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth,' Beck said in his national radio broadcast." Excuse me?! True to form, Beck's disciples piled on. The first comment on Beck's site Tuesday in reaction to the news that Breivik's attorney described his client as "insane" was "I really feel for the guy. He loves his country so much that to see his own culture eroded away by multicultures that the govt is letting in, drove him to this heinous act." God forbid American patriotism take the same turn. Oh, wait... Meanwhile, things don't look much better in Europe: Mario Borghezio, member of the European Parliament (!) and Italy's xenophobic Northern League, said in a radio interview, "Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good -- barring the violence. Some of them are great." Read Egan's whole post for a great commentary on the wider -- and deeply troubling -- narrative surrounding Breivik's actions.
• Back to the GOP for a quick sec: Mother Jones's Kevin Drum points out that the level of personal animosity and vindictiveness in Congress today is something new and different. No longer do crusty Congressmen holler at each other all morning and then sit down and make deals all afternoon. "When he was trying to whip his troops into line to vote for his debt ceiling bill on Wednesday, [Boehner's] pitch was simple: 'President Obama hates it. Harry Reid hates it. Nancy Pelosi hates it. Why would Republicans want to be on the side of President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi is beyond me.' That was enough for conservative firebrand Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.). Boehner's plan wasn't perfect, he said in a Facebook post, but 'the fact Pelosi, Reid and Obama hate it doggone makes it perfect enough.' " With Krugman, remind me again why we're determined to reach for headlines that portray the Dems and Republicans as equally intransigent?

Great Utne reads to enjoy this weekend:

• "The Great Republican Sacred Cow:" if you guessed "no new taxes," you'd be right...
• "Liberating America from Wall Street Rule:" there's a novel idea. Guess how we do it: start by making things with real value (as opposed to credit-default swap "value," which is merely printing money to line traders' and bankers' pockets with). And ultimately, it's about (un)employment, stupid.
• "The Coming Economic Disaster:" not to put too fine a point on things, here's one version of the coming car crash of the American, European and Chinese economies. It ain't pretty...

Thrilled the Sox are playing well and/or glad to have the NFL back in your life? Time to "get uncomfortable" about those, too. Here's controversial military/defense writer Andrew Bacevich on the Sox' "hoo-yah" Fourth of July celebrations and, even better, Dave Zirin on the horribly anti-moral co-option and corruption of Pat Tillman's legacy. Both writers aptly cover the growing and troubling links between professional sports and the military that have sprung up since 9/11. Regardless of what you think about NFL players "going to war out there" every Sunday, consider that "When military planes fly over the Super Bowl or General David Petraeus tosses the coin to start the Super Bowl, we don’t blink. If going to war isn’t political, then nothing is. Yet this mix of sports and politics seems perfectly natural to us. It’s not seen as political at all" (Zirin). In the specific case of Tillman, Zirin not only charges that he has been more useful to the politico-military spin establishment dead than alive, but clarifies that the greater part of Tillman's valor was not in forsaking NFL millions for the Army Rangers, but for standing up to The Man: "Tillman had very un-embedded feelings about the Iraq war. His close friend Army Specialist Russell Baer recalled, “I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town. . . . We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so fucking illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.” " From Bacevich's extended meditation on the Red Sox' Fourth of July theater:

To stand in solidarity with those on whom the burden of service and sacrifice falls is about as far as they will go. Expressions of solidarity affirm that the existing relationship between soldiers and society is consistent with democratic practice. By extension, so too is the distribution of prerogatives and responsibilities entailed by that relationship: a few fight, the rest applaud. Put simply, the message that citizens wish to convey to their soldiers is this: Although choosing not to be with you, we are still for you (so long as being for you entails nothing on our part). Cheering for the troops, in effect, provides a convenient mechanism for voiding obligation and easing guilty consciences. ...The late German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a name for this unearned self-forgiveness and undeserved self-regard. He called it cheap grace. Were he alive today, Bonhoeffer might suggest that a taste for cheap grace, compounded by an appetite for false freedom, is leading Americans down the road to perdition.

From the "You Are What You Eat" Department: if you think you can trust the USDA and FDA to keep you safe, think again. Here's Tom Philpott on the latest agency self-censorship in the face of Big Ag voicing its displeasure. Basically, the USDA produced a document that pointed out that devoting 80% of antibiotics consumed in this country to factory farming might have consequences, for example that "A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA—just one of many now circulating among Americans—now claims more lives each year than AIDS." I've had MRSA. It ain't fun. And it lives in your pork chops. Getting uncomfortable? (If you want to get really excited or really uncomfortable -- or both! -- about what you're putting in your body, click here for a range of TED talks on food. I highly recommend Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman [both on page 2] and Josette Sheeran.)

Finally, the requisite happy/intriguing ending: maybe we're on to something with all this, after all (and three cheers for travel and new experience!)

Challenging the Right, on both sides of the Atlantic

Before I get to the political Right -- Murdoch, Breivik and Boehner -- I am compelled to take on religious conservatism, specifically of the papal variety. An Taoiseach, Enda Kenney, a politically and religiously conservative man and practicing Catholic, pulled no punches in lighting up the Vatican last Wednesday. Speaking on the floor of the Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament, in reaction to the publication of the Cloyne Report on sexual abuse in the Irish Church, the Taoiseach loosed all the righteous rage and indignation of a people that have been more completely under the spell -- and the thumb -- of the Church of Rome than any other in Western Christendom. I can't encourage you enough to read his whole speech (it's not very long, and linked above).

"It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children," said an Taoiseach in his preamble.

But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic…as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism....the narcissism .......that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s “ear of the heart”......the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.

All true, and all damning of the Church's way of operating. Till now, the Vatican has been in the business of obscuring, obfuscating, demurring, clamming up and outright lying in order to protect itself. If the Church is going to maintain any credibility at all, indeed, if it has any intention at all of preaching the Gospel and holding us all to a higher moral standard and encouraging us to be our best selves with a straight face, it had better get out ahead of the crisis and start begging forgiveness instead of buying and/or enforcing silence. When a person or organization speaks in absolutes, as Rome is wont to do, it is necessarily hard to retract from those positions. This is even more the case when one speaks in infallible absolutes. The Great Commandment, on which the Church was founded, is to "love thy neighbor as thyself." It is not to "cover thine ass for all thou art worth."

The only person in the Irish Church who has come through the scandal with any shred of dignity intact is Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, who has been routinely passed over for election to the College of Cardinals and received an official cold shoulder for his efforts at reconciliation. Where the rest of the Church, from the Pope to the parish priests, has pointedly refused time and again to accept any blame whatsoever or to issue even a sincere apology for its sins, Archbishop Martin has demonstrated in the most elemental ways he can how sincere are his remorse and desire to reconcile with his flock. With Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston, he famously washed the feet of several victims of clerical abuse during a public Mass. Moreover, he has not only apologized sincerely, but recognized (during the foot-washing service) that apologies only go so far: "Someone once reminded me of the difference between on the one hand apologising or saying sorry and on the other hand asking forgiveness. I can bump into someone on the street and say “Sorry”. It can be meaningful or just an empty formula. When I say sorry I am in charge. When I ask forgiveness however I am no longer in charge, I am in the hands of the others. Only you can forgive me; only God can forgive me. I, as Archbishop of Dublin and as Diarmuid Martin, stand here in this silence and I ask forgiveness of God and I ask for the first steps of forgiveness from of all the survivors of abuse."

The day that Benedict XVI -- or his successor -- stands in silence and in supplication of the forgiveness of God, survivors of abuse and Catholics everywhere, instead of in his usual infallible indignation and indifference, will be the day the Church may truly begin the healing process at last. The tables have turned, Your Holiness: for the first time in over 2,000 years, it is time for the Church to go to her flock in confession and accept the penance given. And it's going to take more than a few "Hail Marys" and "Our Fathers;" for starters, I don't think a Vatican III for the 21st Century would be asking too much...

***

To tell the truth, I have not followed either the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Britain nor the Norwegian terror attacks allegedly perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in every intimate detail. With the rest of the world, I'm repulsed by both men and their actions (or the actions of their underlings, in Murdoch's case), sorry for the victims and concerned about the wider implications of each.

And we can't deny that there are wider implications for, or perhaps even indictments of, our culture inherent in both the Murdoch and Breivik cases. Neither are truly "lone wolves" in the sense that they cooked up in their twisted souls or unhinged minds actions that have no precedent and no demand. Murdoch's News of the World was not some unread right-wing rag, but a popular mainstream tabloid. Breivik, for all the apparent insanity of his actions, does not strike me as either truly insane nor as a lone Islamophobic crank. I am not about to claim that he is mainstream, but it is chilling that he has maintained that the world will understand his actions in a matter of decades.

Much as I sincerely hope that does not come to pass, we -- by which I mean mostly white, well-off Europeans and Americans -- do need to appreciate that Breivik is coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is not nearly as foreign as we would like to tell ourselves it is. Others have already drawn the parallels between Breivik's attacks and Jared Loughner's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (remember her?) and to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, but I want to draw the connection between Murdoch, Breivik and the insidiously creeping monism and xenophobia that threaten our vaunted Western cosmopolitan values.

I've written before (and I'm certainly not the only one) that there is a fundamental disconnect in the European project as it currently stands regarding who exactly qualifies as "European." For the cosmopolitan Eurocrats who have been dreaming and imagining the European community for sixty years, that is a theoretical, intellectual and/or geo-political debate. But on the national and even more so on the individual level, it is a personal question. That is more a result of microeconomics than of pure nationalism, though nationalism plays an important role. But nationalism simply proves that "when it's not about the money, it's about the money," as one of my professors like to say. Or, to paraphrase a German friend, individual "European-ness" goes out the window the moment one's own taxes and, more importantly, state entitlements are brought into question. If states extend their social-democratic munificence to immigrants, that means there are more people clamoring for a piece of approximately the same pie as there were before. And when that pie is composed of individuals' tax money, the potential for resentment is understandably high.

I do not exempt the Americans from this criticism, either. We take an equally charitable view towards Mexicans and other Central and South American immigrants as Europeans do towards Muslims and North Africans; anyone who still remembers the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy will moreover have to admit that we can indulge in the occasional bout of Islamophobia ourselves. (That, and the fact that passing a Constitutional amendment to quash the creeping danger of Sharia law remains an arguably higher -- though somewhat stealthier -- priority of the current U.S. Congress and many state legislatures, but we'll get to that.)

Both Murdoch's and Breivik's transgressions were undeniably wrong and have caused a tremendous amount of grief and hurt to a lot of people. But before we get too carried away with cheering the downfall of the media's Mr. Potter or rooting on the Norwegians in hastily upping their maximum allowable prison term from 21 years (!!) so that Breivik could not be set free at the age of 50 (into a world that would understand the actions that got him locked away in the first place?), we need to take a harder look at the bigger picture. And I quite literally mean "we," gentle readers: all of us big-name-college-attending, Polo-wearing, Volvo-driving, Northeastern liberal faux-European stock are quite often part of the problem. Either we don't understand ("Hmph! I read the New York Times, never the Daily Mail!"), or we don't pay enough attention or give enough credence to the machinations of the "other guys" whom we probably don't understand anyway (care to guess how many U.S. states have considered legislation banning Sharia law or other "foreign" legal systems? Twenty-two!! Yep, nearly half of all these United States have seen fit to debate outlawing Islamic law in these days of 10 percent unemployment, self-imposed debt crisis, etc.)

So, if you're a Massachusetts or New York resident whose morning routine involves pulling on some Ralph Lauren or Land's End number, grabbing a Starbucks, commiserating with Paul Krugman about the latest affront to "the conscience of a liberal" and patting yourself on the back for living in a state that has legalized gay marriage, you're too comfortable. If you're proud to have a black(ish) President but don't personally know or interact with any black or Hispanic people (who are, it was announced yesterday in a statistic that sounded more like an Onion headline, suffering more from the current economic environment than are whites), you're too comfortable. And most of all, if you don't fundamentally understand what's going on with the U.S. economy (i.e. what 10 percent unemployment really means to your fellow Americans and what a crime this self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis is), what's going on with the Euro-crisis and its potential ramifications in Europe and the world, and/or what the real ramifications of default or downgrade of the U.S. would be (and how criminally insane it is that our government is trying its damnedest to turn us into Greece by choice), then you're too...feckin'...comfortable!

Much as Europeans need to do some serious soul-searching to determine what an appetite for the News of the World so ravenous that it reached (so far) from Scotland Yard to the prime minister's cabinet and a cultural xenophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik (look up his manifesto and confession online for lists of the ultra-reactionary militant groups he drew inspiration from, from Britain to Scandinavia) say about their society, Americans need to do the same in response to the debt-ceiling crisis and its outcome. I'll leave the culture wars to fight another day. What is most important right now is to look -- really look at and understand -- where we are, how we got here, what's happening, what options are on the table and what they would each achieve if passed.

I'm not going to run through all the messy details. From a factual standpoint, most of what you need to know about where we're at today is contained in two of today's Times editorials, on the choices on the table (which are"between bad and worse"), and the "denial of reality" that is standard operating procedure in the Republican camp. Here are the basic facts to keep in mind:

1) The crisis is self-imposed. If the (Republican) Congress hadn't/didn't draw a line in the sand on the formality of raising the debt ceiling, there is no problem with our current credit as such. There are undeniably long-term policy problems with our borrowing, which is what the Tea Party-coddling Republican strategy is nominally reacting to, but in the short term all that stands between us and default is a congressional OK, which has previously been rubber-stamped ever since Congress got a say in the debt ceiling decades ago. The bottom line is that if we go Greece, we've no one but House Republicans to blame for it, and blame them we must.

2) In less than a week, on 2nd August (or thereabouts), there simply won't be any money left to pay the bills. Unimaginable? Yes. But it's the new reality of the Tea Party-influenced Great Recession country we live in. Either get used to it or get angry and tell Congress where to stick its misplaced, sudden and utterly hypocritical debt puritanism. If you read the second NYT editorial above, you'll get a glimpse of some of the utter BS the Republicans are spewing right now -- there's billions squirreled away somewhere; default ain't no big thing; we're not really going to run out of money because the Treasury is really just a tool of that communist Mau Mau Muslim of a President we've got, so it can't possibly be telling the truth; etc. You can't make this shit up, and no one is calling them on it. They say these things with absolute impunity because no one has found the cojones or moral courage or whatever to look Palin, Bachmann, T-Paw, Cantor, Boehner and the lot square in the eyes and say, "At long last, have ye no decency?"

3) This is major-league politics with major-league consequences, and it's being conducted by a bunch of bush-league freshman representatives. In short, U.S. government default ends the world economic system as we've known it since WWII. The slightly less ominous prospect of a credit rating downgrade will permanently increase borrowing costs on the Federal government and by extension on state and local governments and on consumers. Planning to take out a mortgage on a house or a car? Those rates are tied to Treasury rates, and they'll be going up if we get downgraded, which may happen whether or not we raise the debt ceiling. (Side note: just who the hell are these all-powerful ratings agencies and who elected them lords of the world economy? Vague threats from S&P's, Moody's and others have kept the Euro-crisis unfolding, cast a pall over the U.S. debt ceiling crisis and kept the markets in uncertain flux since 2008. Like the Tea Party, no one seems willing or able to tell them to take a hike.) In any case, paying an extra $200-$400 a month on a $200,000 mortgage might not amount to diddly-squat if you've "gone rogue" to the tune of a few million dollars (Palin), spent $4,700 on your hair and makeup since you started campaigning (Bachmann) or spend whatever Boehner spends on his tan, but in real-people terms, another Benjamin lost to interest every week or two is real money.

Politics is one thing. Playing party politics (which both sides are doing) is another. But outright lying with a straight (bright orange) face is another. Remember when the punditry got all worked up about how Obama had "lost control of the narrative" to the Republicans? Think what an understatement that really is. If Obama is willing to sacrifice entitlements, health care, tax reform and who knows what else from the liberal agenda and that's still not enough for the Tea Party, what does that say about each side? Think for a minute about how completely the New Right has seized control of not only the congressional narrative, but the vocabulary of daily life: we can't say the words "liberal," "entitlement" or "tax (increase)" without flinching or embarrassment; things like cost-cutting, "best practices" and supply-side economics are firmly entrenched in our way of looking at the world; no one in politics is willing to admit that there is 10 percent unemployment, much less deal with it (despite my Paul Krugman jibe earlier, he's been on a roll lately as one of the only serious and respected voices dutifully reminding us a couple of times every week that unemployment is the clearest and present-est danger to the economy); we can't regulate anything or anyone worth a damn and refuse to prosecute anyone but private citizens who cheated on the order of thousands of dollars in the wake of the crash; we instinctively deride "Obamacare" as creeping un-American socialism; and we let politicians of all stripes but especially Republicans lie through their teeth about everything from the President's citizenship to the death of Osama bin Laden to the real reasons for the debt crisis. How anyone can say with a straight face that Obama is solely responsible for the Great Recession and the biggest spending binge in history is absolutely beyond me. The crash started during and was a direct result of the administration of George W. Bush, and the earliest and most expensive stimulus measures were passed by the Bush administration. Besides, basic economic principles demand more government spending (yes, deficit-funded spending) in recessions to stimulate demand, not government cut-backs. To suddenly "get serious" about debt after cheering the Bush tax cuts and two unfunded boondoggles in the Middle East is the height of hypocrisy.

To be fair, I have lost a lot of faith in President Obama as this crisis has worn on. His willingness to concede fundamental points and programs to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship and compromise has been uninspiring and unimaginative. His speeches have been likewise. His patrician whining has been exasperating and unproductive (if you're the only adult in Washington, sir, act like it -- teach, cajole and/or spank the "kids" into line, don't cry about it to the voters). I had hoped that the election of the first independent President in modern times (let's face it, he's not really a Democrat, as evidenced by congressional Democrats' howls of protest at being shut out by the Oval Office) would bring with it a new, 21st-century chief executive who had a plan and the energy and bare-knuckled political will to educate the country about it and then set about enacting it in vintage Jackson/T. Roosevelt/F. D. Roosevelt style. Sadly, we got the compromiser-in-chief.

You can't expect to transform Washington by expecting it to compromise on its own. That's business-as-usual to a fault, and if the past three years haven't made that abundantly clear, I don't know what will. Though the Tea Party is completely out of touch with reality, it has hit upon something in seizing on constituent concerns and politicking for all it's worth to respond to them. That those expectations are ginned up, trumped up and hypocritically misrepresented is inexcusable, but at least the Tea Party has set an agenda and fought for it. I do not for a moment wish to see a President elected who would embody or follow the morally bankrupt Big Lie tactics of the Tea Party, but it cannot be denied that it is much easier to control the narrative when you actually have a narrative. Obama isn't trying to get even or get ahead; increasingly, he's not even getting mad, just whiny. Though we should have been doing so long ago, appealing to the nation to call their representatives and demand a deal when you, the President, can't get one done, is hardly the "adult" way of going about things.

Just like individual complacency regarding anti-Sharia initiatives, racial/socio-economic disparity, unemployment, and failure to be informed of and understand what's really going on in the world must be made uncomfortable, political complacency with lying, cheating, stealing, moral bankruptcy and focusing on the wrong issues for the wrong reasons must be made uncomfortable. If President Obama finds it less uncomfortable to let the Republican narrative go unchallenged and their intransigence stand than to confront them ("You want to bang on about birther/truther/deather/debt-puritan bullshit when we've got 10 percent unemployment, a broken economy, a hurting environment and an unsustainable population to worry about? Get out of my sight, and get the hell out of office!"), we as citizens need to start calling the White House as well as the Capitol and reversing his order of preferences. If Congress can't figure out how to "just say no" to pork, Laffer curves, non-regulation, pointless legislation and self-inflicted intransigence (even senior Republicans were admitting last week that their pledge-signing and apocalyptic/absolutist rhetoric had put them in a bit of an ideological Alamo), then we need to vote 'em out. Representatives are up for election every two years. If, as the current batch have, they have been an embarrassment to themselves and their country while in office, they need to go.

But most of all, if we can take anything from the events of the past several weeks, it is the lesson that it is long, long past time to open a serious, adult (though I hesitate to use that word), moral conversation in this country and the world. The Vatican must be put on notice that it's "Blessed are the peacemakers [Abp. Martin]," not "Blessed are the obfuscators [Benedict and pretty well everyone else involved]." Europeans and Americans need to start feeling uncomfortable about the privileged, wholly-unsustainable bubbles we live in. We'd better figure out how to deal with people who don't look, act, dress or believe the same as we do, and we've got to sort out how to stop conspicuously consuming resources at a rate that would require 2.5 Earths to sustain before we exhaust the one Earth we've got. And politicians everywhere have got to start either feeling uncomfortable about being crooks and/or cowards on their own, or we've got to make them uncomfortable.

Let's face it: we're not going to "win the future" with moon-shot platitudes when we don't even operate a space shuttle any longer. The longer we tuck ourselves in at night with the comforting thought that we once made it to the moon, the further out of reach we put the future. I'm not worried about maintaining "American exceptionalism" for its own sake, I'm worried about making sure that we demand the honesty, honor and moral courage of ourselves and our politicians to ensure that we create and hand off a better America -- and a better world -- to our children and their children. That's winning the future, and it's not mutually exclusive, either. In fact, it can't be: if being "exceptional" requires living beyond our means on the sweat of the rest of the world, we're not that exceptional nor admirable, and the world literally cannot cope with others aspiring to or achieving our level of "exception." If, however, being "exceptional" means that we're engaged in bettering our selves, our country and our world and making sure that we have the freest, most democratic, most welcoming society we can create, that's worthy of admiration and emulation, and it won't be zero-sum. Everyone can aspire to that and the world will be a better place for it.

I hope to hell you're uncomfortable by now. I hope you're squirming and the Starbucks next to you is growing cold. I hope you read the NYT's editorial page, call your congressman and bike to work. I hope you challenge yourself to be your best self and see what difference you can make. And, lest you think I'm just an angry, hopeless crank, I hope you'll read and take to heart the three most important reactions to the attacks in Norway. If we can all -- citizens, politicians, religious leaders, whomever alike -- take these to heart, we might actually benefit from the tragedy. From Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg: "Our response is more democracy, more openness and more humanity." From the Mayor of Oslo, Fabian Stang: "I don't think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect." And finally, from a young girl who survived the shooting spree on the island of Utoya: "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness [sic] can create." Amen.

(Oh, and I hope you watch this video, filmed on Shop Street in Galway.)